Topic: Donkey Kong Bananza

Has anybody else here tried the in-store demo? There's one Target near me that has it. I've played it 4 or 5 times over the course of three trips and also brought each of my kids to play it twice each.

Not to hype it up too much, but man it's amazing fun so far, both for people who just want to smash through everything (e.g. my kids) and for those who love exploring well-made levels in the way the devs "intended" (e.g. me). Graphics are great, controls are great (once you swap jump to B and down-punch to A), and yeah there are probably frame drops when everything on-screen is exploding at once, but if so it hasn't bothered me a bit.

The demo has you playing through the intro area, which is the mine shown in many of the trailers, and then the first sublevel of what I assume is the first proper level of the game, which is the lagoon area. Yes, there are multiple layers to each of the different biomes. The cutscenes are skippable, but even with my repeated plays I haven't seen everything in that first proper level. The demo lasts 15 minutes or until you access the second layer of that lagoon biome.

So there’s a picture of some crates in the game that has the new donk city name on them so this might not be a prequel.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/797807e4.jpg

@Greatluigi Surely new donk city has been around for a while?

@LastFootnote How would you define DK's movement? Was it different from Mario's movement in Odyssey?

I mean the short answer is yes, it's different. They both control well but they have entirely different movesets and traverse terrain in very different ways. Donkey Kong can roll and jump (and jump in midair after rolling as in Donkey Kong Country games), but there's no crouch or backwards somersault. He can't throw his hat and bounce off of it, obviously. But he can climb most surfaces just by moving toward them, and obviously he can smash through a lot of terrain as well.

If you mean, do Mario and DK feel the same when you're just running around, it's hard for me to say without having both games at hand. They play so differently that I'm not sure it really matters though.

@IsraeliBethoven
Nice, I did not expect to see Nu Pagadi in a Donkey Kong thread.

YouTube is showing advertisement for Bananza. The subtitles call DK, "decay", poor fella.

@N00BiSH I just finished a 100% playthrough of Mario Odyssey today and then went back and tried the Bananza demo in order to compare their movement. A couple of things I noticed:

1. Mario feels more acrobatic than DK for sure. They did a good job of making DK feel heavier.
2. The camera seems far more zoomed in for Bananza, and there wasn't an obvious way of changing that. It makes it very difficult to get a feel for how fast the two characters are relative to each other.

@LastFootnote
Yea, that makes sense. The DK games have always had a heavier sense of weight than the Mario counterparts, both 2D and 3D.

I'm glad this game has the whole roll-jump thing that's been in the Country franchise!

Got to try the demo at a Walmart as well. Was in a hurry so only got to play 5-10 minutes, but darn was it fun. The destruction is so satisfying man. Waiting another 2 weeks for this game is gonna be pain lol.

Was hesitant at first, but Im so hype for the game. I hope is funnnnnn

@Akeratsu
Well, all the previews and people who have found a demo kisok have said it's fun, so I'm gonna say it's probably fun for most people lol

Ok, after playing the demo for the umpteenth time, I have found a minor gripe. The hand slap move that collects things around you seems mostly limited to what the camera can see. This wouldn’t be a problem if the camera were more like Odyssey’s, but unfortunately it’s much more zoomed in. It’s a camera that I think works well for the gameplay overall, but is a small annoyance when you’re trying to smash through things and pick up gold that lands behind you.

@LastFootnote
In the Direct I think they showed how the skill tree can upgrade the radius of the move, so at the beginning it’s probably small and can be made larger over time. I wouldn’t think it has anything to do with whether the camera can see the item or not.

@rallydefault Actually, I upgraded it two steps in the demo, which is how this even became noticeable. When the radius is small, this doesn’t really matter because you’ll probably have it all in your field of view. As it gets bigger, it starts to really become apparent that it’s not collecting things behind you.

EDIT: I do want to emphasize that this is a minor gripe. And if it's actually the case (hard to do rigorous tests in a 15-minute demo at a store kiosk), I can sort of understand why they'd make it this way. Especially for things that aren't gold, the game wants you to see all the things you're collecting so that you know what you've got. It's very important to know e.g. whether or not you have a balloon when doing some tough platforming.

@LastFootnote
It just seems really weird that it's not just a straight-up radius thing, whether or not the item is in your field of view, you know? I don't know any other game that does things that way with similar abilities.

@rallydefault
Well, weird or not, I've now 100% confirmed it works this way. I ran a bunch of tests, but I'll describe the most telling one here. There's this small, short plateau in the intro area with six Banandium Chips on top arranged in a circle. (This is in a room that's specifically designed to showcase the hand-slap move.) I collected two of them jumping up onto the plateau, and then stood in the middle. I swiveled the camera away from the other four and down as far as it would go, which also obscured Donkey Kong and just gave me a view of the upper far corner of the room. I executed several hand slaps, but they didn't collect any of the remaining chips that were right next to DK. Without moving DK at all, I swiveled the camera to an overhead view, did another hand-slap, and voila! All of the chips were instantly collected.

So yeah, I think one of two things is happening. Either a collectible needs to be both within the hand-slap radius and within the camera's viewport OR it needs to be within the hand-slap radius and actually rendered on-screen. I didn't think to test which one it was until I was already driving away from the store. But I hypothesize it's the latter, and I now have a theory as to why this is. I think the devs may have used "is this item rendered on-screen" as a shorthand for "is this item not e.g. totally encased in stone"? It would be weird if DK could just collect ALL items in his hand-slap radius even if they were deep inside a wall, right? Possibly they just made this shortcut instead of actually trying to calculate whether there's a "path" between DK and the item.

Anyway I'm not thrilled with how it works, but I doubt it's going to ruin my enjoyment of the game. It's just a bit of a bummer, especially when you're trying to rip through an area as quickly as possible and collect the gold that appears in your wake (because, for example, you can only play for 15 minutes at a time before the demo resets).

@LastFootnote
Yea, that’s gotta be the case. Still weird they couldn’t program a “has this item been freed from a wall?” trigger in the code.

The "DK Bananza should've been a Wario game" take I've seen going around continues to baffle me. Having finally managed to play the demo I can say with confidence that there is nothing "Wario-like" about it at all, outside of collecting treasure and even then it's not really the focus.

@Dev-N I envy you.